Magic: The Gathering – Bloomburrow Review

thesixthaxis.com:

The start of August saw the release of Magic: The Gathering – Bloomburrow, the seventh set of the year, and there’s plenty yet to come with the addition of Foundations to the release calendar in November pushing up the next set, Duskmourn, up to be just seven weeks away. But as anti-cute as Duskmourn promises to be, it’s time to appreciate the fluffy and adorable Bloomburrow.

Bloomburrow is, as we said, incredibly cute. MTG is, at its core, a game where we visit different planes of existence that each have their own rules, lores, histories and so on. Bloomburrow’s shtick is that there are no humans, and any humans that do make their way here are turned into animalfolk for the duration of their visit. The majority of players seem to agree that this is a nice change of pace, but the impact that it has had on gameplay is unfortunate.

This focus on creature types creates what it known as a tribal set, which tends to be quite shallow when it comes to building your deck. This is certainly true when it comes to the draft experience – while experienced players can eek out win percentage by knowing when to pivot, the difficulty level of this set is really quite low, making it very accessible to newer players.

Each creature type in Bloomburrow represents two of Magic’s five colours. Otters, for example, are red and blue-aligned. Mice are Red and White, while squirrels are Green and Black. This is fantastic when it comes to new players learning the game — in Draft (where you pass packs of cards around the table, taking one at a time and adding it to your deck), you can simply pick all of the cards that say Lizard or Frog and put them into a deck, rather than stopping to read each card and see what it does — something vital to more complex sets.

Unfortunately, some animals are more equal than others – how very Animal Farm – and a clear tier list has emerged on Arena. Rabbit (Green-White) and mice decks are hyper-aggressive and win quickly, with slower otter decks struggling to keep